Electronic technology has changed communication radically. The ubiquity of computers and mobile devices, and of Internet access, has made distance seem immaterial for many transactions. It is just as easy for two people on different continents to meet via video chat if they shared an office building. This new communicative freedom has famously enabled friends to stay in touch across thousands of miles with little effort, but has ironically done very little to change interactions between neighbors. The very freedom from geographical limitation that electronic systems offer creates a geographical blind spot, making it difficult to use electronic technology to contact somebody who lives across the street, absent some concerted sleuthing. There are times, however, when the ability to communicate with the other people in one's neighborhood is very useful, precisely because of the unique interests they share owing to their geographical proximity.
An important example of this problem may be seen in the experience of shipping and receiving parcels in the Information Age. It is now considered routine to be able to track the progress of packages online, and to predict their arrival within periods predicated, generally, on the quality of shipping for which the customer was willing to pay. One aspect of shipping, however, remains as unpredictable as ever: the actual moment of delivery. It is perhaps impossible to expect any shipping company to name the exact time of a delivery, owing to the complicated logistics of planning delivery routes. As a result, while the recipient can often predict delivery down to the day (or even half a day, in some cases), the recipient cannot generally predict the time of day the delivery will occur. The attempts that have thus far been made to rectify this have involved techniques to inform the recipient that delivery has occurred, but none so far have given the recipient the ability to know the time of delivery in advance.
There is thus a need for a system that enables neighbors to contact one another conveniently by electronic means, and particularly to track and communicate regarding the delivery of packages at the most local level.